A Funeral Ring
by Fractaledsymmetry
Summary: Characters reminiscing about those they've lost, inspired by Tennyson's "In Memorium."
1. Chapter 1

Note: This is in a series of fics I'm doing inspired by Alfred Tennyson's poem "In Memorium." The titles and some lines in each chapter are direct allusions to the poem. Continuity is as continuity does. I do not own Firefly or Serenity.

Draw Him Home

Deep in the black, a Firefly sails home from the edges of space, not that home is anywhere particular, and for at least one of the crew, it might be gone.

They have one last stop to make first and who's flying this thing anyway? It should have been her husband, but he's gone now, lost in that final battle on Miranda.

Zoe blinks in the almost darkness and prays the ship will arrive to his final resting place quickly and maybe she won't have to think about it anymore. Maybe when _Serenity_ no longer carries his remains, she can reach to the empty space next to her in her bed and pretend that Wash is just far away. Probably not.

She dreams of the nights they were planetside, and he would hold her as they looked up at the stars because the stars always looked different when they weren't flying through them. But is she dreaming really? Does it count as dreaming when you can't sleep?

All the tiny lights of the ship glare at her, blinding her. All she wants right now is to be swallowed by darkness, to join her husband there.

Zoe goes to the deck where Mal is steering the ship. He tells her to go to sleep, but she tells him she can't and sits in the other chair. She gazes at the stillness out the window. Sleep. What a wonderful thing it would be, to sleep as the heavens, before the prow, to sleep as her husband sleeps now. But it is not time to sleep, not for her. It will be a long time before she sees her husband again, she knows.

And with this thought, her eyelids fall at last.


	2. Chapter 2

The Sailor at the Wheel

She curses this ship. And she curses Mal for ever deciding to buy it. And she curses him for hiring Wash, and she curses Wash and his stupid mustache. All of them, for causing her such grief.

In the night, Zoe dreams of the days when Wash was alive. Something's wrong about the way it looks she knows, the light is wrong, like it's some old movie, but she pushes that to the back of her thoughts because now she is walking through the ship, getting to know it for more than the piece of junk she thought it was to begin with. She remembers his voice over the intercom, calling to their room only, where only she rests.

"You should come up."

"You should come down." She responds.

"I need to pilot the ship." There's a pause because they both know that's a lie, "and there's nothing like a night under the stars." Oh why is it that she can't resist that man?

She opens the door and climbs up the ladder. The ship is dark but for the lights at the front, where Wash is piloting. Her husband sits at the wheel, and she sneaks up behind him, running her hands down his shoulders. He spins around in his chair, and she isn't sure which of them falls into the others' arms.

And Zoe blesses this ship, this stupid ship, and Mal's stupid idea that brought them altogether, Kaylee, Jayne, Inara, Book, Simon and River... but she is happiest about the pilot, that the ship brought the sailor to his wife.

In the back of Zoe's dream mind, she knows that the sailor is gone, but she pushes away those thoughts and settles for the idle dreams of happiness, the one ground on which they are still together.

And that ground is covered in grass now. The ship dissolves, and she lays with her husband in one of the greenest fields she's ever seen.

He rolls on top of her and smiles. "I told you we should ask Mal if we could get away."

And they are away, far away from everyone else, just the two of them.

And when they return to civilization, perhaps he'll take her out to dinner in some little town.

But this dissolves too, and Zoe returns to her room alone. No voice calls over the intercom this time, and the lighting is real now, darker. She lifts her hand to her face, as if pulling it out of the syrup of her dreams, and sees there is no second hand clasping it. She cries.


End file.
